


Fair shall the end be, though long and hard shall be the road

by NormalAnomaly



Category: Glowfic and Related Works
Genre: Context What Context, First Person, Gen, Logistics, MIT, Road Trip, Swearing, college fic, glowfic, school pride, self-indulgent nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:15:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25054495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NormalAnomaly/pseuds/NormalAnomaly
Summary: A short fic set in westwind's Cascadia setting. When Massachusetts loses its academic freedom, MIT goes in search of greener pastures. Not a trustworthy source on the timeline of events in Cascadia canon.
Kudos: 25
Collections: Cascadia





	Fair shall the end be, though long and hard shall be the road

"Hey, Blue, did you see the email? We're moving." 

"What, the lab?" Frak, another bloody thing amid everything else going on. What did Dr. Gray have against this room? 

"No," said Ray, "the _Institute_. We're all packing up and moving to Oregon. Goal is to be gone in a week." 

I was so startled I ejected my pipetteful of antibodies into the wrong frakking tube. But apparently it didn't matter because I needed to stop doing this assay and move to Oregon. 

I pulled out my phone and checked my email, just in case Ray was full of shit, but he wasn't. There was a big pile of adminspeak from the President that boiled down to: it's not safe to stay here, so we're grabbing everything that isn't architecture and starting over in Portland where there'll be some sort of militia between us and the fundies. There were also a pile of follow-up emails from practically every list I was on, explaining how every subgroup and structure I was a part of was divvying up packing responsibilities and van space. 

"Well," I said, "I actually agree with admin for once. About closing dorms, even! I'll go get our boxes from the lobby if you start unplugging shit. Apparently we need to be ready for them to clean out the minus-80 by tomorrow morning." 

Ray started circling the lab, shutting down computers and wrapping equipment in its own power cords like some kind of half-assed shibari. "Yup. Thank Cthulhu we're not one of the animal labs. They're not going to make undergrads pack up the mice or anything, but it's gonna confound their data all to hell. JHat was bitching about it this morning." 

"Long as they don't make us ride in the same truck as the monkeys, lmao." 

(Look, I have nothing against monkeys, but they smell awful and the safety document on what to do if one bites you is not pretty.) 

I hit up the lobby and it was unsurprisingly a feeding frenzy; the 'tute was probably consuming the entire cardboard-box and packing-tape output of the Boston metro area and the physplant atop the pile was still enforcing rationing. "Ten at a time, if you need more come back later." Valid of them, and it's not like we could fit more than five unflattened boxes in our floorspace at once. I brought ours back and helped Ray Tetris the various towers, monitors, peripherals, shakers, PCR machines, flasks, endless boxes of pipette tips, and piles of stained data notebooks into them, with a label on each one indicating contents, fragility, and transport priority. We'd be grabbing every truck, van, u-haul, tour bus, car, motorcycle, and donkey-cart we could get, but some stuff was inevitably going to be left behind and it ought to be the stuff we could replace. Kunal the postdoc joined us about 20 minutes in; Dr. Gray was working out truck space and refrigeration with the other PIs. 

Eventually it got to be 1345 and I asked Ray if he and Kunal could handle the rest of it on account of how I was a MITSFS officer and we were packing up the library at 14. Ray, who is an awesome person, said yes he could, so I cleared out. I still showed up to MITSFS three minutes late, though, because KChen killed me in Live Action Mafia right outside W20 and I had to report my death. After two hours of pouring paperbacks into boxes I checked the graveyard forum; suspicion for my death had fallen on Putz-Maria (who was in fact also mafia) and the ghosts were planning a road-trip-optimized game for during the haul to Portland. I added my two cents to the debate over day lengths and whether it was possible to incentivize kills on the bus and not just at gas stations and then biked back to Random.

Nobody at Random was talking about anything other than the move. There were people documenting the murals, people speculating about the dorm situation the admins had arranged in Portland, people comparing notes on the handling of lab equipment. Apparently dismantling the CoGen plant to a level where it could be safely abandoned to whoever wandered in next was going to be a whole thing. KChen turned out to have gotten a commercial vehicles license last year for shiggles and now she had a job driving one of the grad student busses, which was really going to help with her alibis if Road Trip Mafia happened. 

I still had the cardboard boxes from last time I moved rooms, so that made my packing job easier. Every undergrad had been alloted an equal amount of cargo space for the journey, and there was a thriving secondary market as people with more shit paid people with less shit to transport some of their shit. There were also at least two different surveys going around from course 14s trying to use the common denominator of box space to establish the exchange rate between cash, cookies, Bitcoin, joking promises of someone else's Bitcoin, unspecified sexual favors, beanie babies, and five-pound bags of potassium chloride. 

Every restaurant on Mass Ave was packed solid for the next five days with people eating their favorite meals once more for old times' sake. I scored a final bowl of dan-dan noodles from Mary Chung on my fourth attempt. Hopefully the infusion of cash would help the restaurants weather the storm of ten thousand people leaving the city at once. It wasn't much, set against the entire population of Boston, but the population of Boston wasn't what it used to be either. The Airgas trucks woke up East Campus at three AM one last time, emptying the giant dewars of LN2 and liquid helium instead of filling them. 

On the morning of D-Day (the people trying to stick to "Departure Day" had been fighting a doomed battle), I joined everyone else in lugging my boxes down the stairs and onto the truck. Everybody had a backpack and a suitcase for the four days we expected to be on the road; everything else we wouldn't be seeing again until Portland. The admins had been extremely cagey about where we would be stopping for the night--even KChen swore she didn't know--but for once no one blamed them. The Gileadite government was already making noises about border security and exit visas, and none of us were as sure as we'd've liked to be about how they'd react to a horde of ninety percent godless heathens getting out of their hair and taking a disproportionate amount of capital along with. I imagined the whole situation had to suck ass for the devout Christians in the student body, but if any of my acquaintances were among their number they weren't out about it to me. 

My musing was cut short by a taco--excuse me, a campus security officer--asking if everyone in the dorm had loaded their belongings. I helped him figure it out (given the need to put books on the bottom and clothes on top a bunch of people weren't confident in the loadedness of their own stuff) and by the time we converged on an answer the answer was yes. The truck pulled away and was replaced by a tour bus; as the smallest undergrad dorm we had exactly one and we crammed ourselves into it. We rolled off campus and joined up with the rest of the convoy; unlike the West Campus dorms we didn't get one last poignant glance at the main group. 

I had ended up sitting next to Bonfire-Adam and across the aisle from Adam Goldberg and Pulsar, which meant our first hour of conversation was inevitably about Doctor Who. Then Bonfire-Adam fell asleep and the conversation shifted to the seceding Mormons. 

All through the week leading up to D-Day, people had been speculating about how we would handle the border crossing into Oregon and where we would be staying overnight in the Dakotas, and admin had shared vague plans but mostly let us speculate. About two hours in, we found out the plan over the convoy radio network (and wasn't it something, how many of us just happened to have radios?). We had been driving west like we meant to make for Albany, but we took a right at Springfield and made for Montreal. All the vague noises about the Dakotas had been a distraction; we would be exiting Gilead via the back roads of Vermont and making most of the trip through Canada. Possibly there had been something like international diplomacy involved; the line between a university, a city-state, and a band of nomads was a social construct, and lately a lot of social constructs were not what you'd call structural. 

The next week was a blur of gas station bathrooms, boxes of food the dining people had attempted to standardize before giving up, and sleeping six to a room in motels. We split up into a dozen sub-convoys after the first border crossing; our full bulk would have overwhelmed wherever we stopped. Live Action Mafia added some ways to take game actions at a distance and leave evidence; the day numbers on the forum were the only thing helping me keep any sense of linear time. 

Our arrival in Portland was a chaos that made our departure look choreographed, because nobody was familiar with the new campus. The mayor showed up for a speech and a photo-op, and the buildings she had scrounged for us were quality enough that we smiled super genuinely for the cameras, eyebags and disheveled green hair and all. Really we would have been happy with anywhere we could unpack and eat a hot meal, and we got that, because they had set things up so the food services crew and the furniture had beat us in by two days. The libraries arrived two days after us, and the librarians who had traveled with them, and when MITSFS was back together I earned a few bucks helping reassemble Hayden in the new building 6. (Most of the buildings we acquired had had names, before. We went through from west to east and numbered them and flatly refused to use the names. Not all of the important things needed to go in someone's cargo allowance.) 

Two days after the libraries arrived, the labs started rolling in. The ultra-refrigerated biochemical stores and the animals had been airlifted first of everything, their technician-guardians trading the stress of a road trip for the stress of getting their charges safe and sound in buildings hastily converted from warehouses and apartment blocks. Everything else had come through slowly, fragile loads guarded by watchful PIs and post-docs and old veteran lab techs. Everything needed to be unpacked, cleaned, organized, assembled, calibrated, tested, booted, rebooted, debugged, duct-taped, cussed at, and if that failed threatened with a good kicking. Labs that finished first helped those who hadn't yet, people ended up with each others' Erlenmeyer flasks, the behavior of sharpies could be modeled with the ideal gas law. We got it done. 

And sixty-six hours after the first busload of students stumbled onto campus, the sun rose over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and illuminated a cardboard beaver the size of a Volkswagen, decorated with paint and construction paper and wearing a maroon and grey scarf, perched atop the tallest of the classroom buildings. In its cardboard arms was a sign that said, IHTFP. 


End file.
